How to know what your child kept from this week's tutoring (without turning dinner into a test)

The question that never works

"What did you do at tutoring today?"

"Stuff."

"What kind of stuff?"

"Maths stuff."

I'm a teacher. I know better. And still, for a year, that was the conversation on Wednesday nights, and it got shorter every week. I'd paid for an hour with a very good tutor and I had no idea what had happened in it, and the harder I asked, the less I found out.

The problem isn't the kid. The question is bad. "What did you learn?" asks someone to search a whole hour with no cue, in front of a parent, at a dinner table, and report. Adults can't do that either. Ask a colleague what they learnt in a meeting this afternoon and watch them say "stuff".

Check: Why does "What did you learn at tutoring?" fail as a question, according to the post?

What I'm actually paying for

I had to be honest about what I wanted. Not a report on the hour. I wanted to know one thing: of what was taught this week, what stuck?

That's a different question from "how did it go?". A session can go beautifully and nothing sticks. A session can be a grind and one idea lands for good. The tutor can tell me how it went, and does, and that's useful. But "what stuck" isn't visible in the room. It's visible two days later, when the kid is asked to pull the idea back out without the tutor's help.

So the thing I was missing wasn't information from the tutor. It was a small, low-pressure moment of retrieval, at home, a couple of days on, that I could see the result of.

Check: What is the difference between "how did the session go?" and "what stuck?", and when is the second one visible?

Ten minutes on a Saturday morning

Here's what we do now.

The tutor, Jo, sends me her notes after each session. Sometimes it's a photo of the worksheet, sometimes a PDF, sometimes three lines in a message. I drop that in, read the handful of questions that come back, and on Saturday morning my kid does them on their phone. Six questions, ten minutes, usually in bed. Marked as they finish, with a line under each answer saying why it was right or wrong. I see the same result.

That's it. No test at dinner. No "show me your homework". Ten minutes on a Saturday, from the tutor's own material, and I know what stuck.

The first week I expected resistance. There wasn't much, and I think it's because the questions were about Wednesday's lesson, which was still faintly in reach, and the phone made it feel like a game rather than a worksheet. Also because I kept my mouth shut and let them do it.

Check: What does the parent's Saturday routine consist of, and where does the material come from?

I'm not the tutor, and that's fine

I don't teach maths. I read every question anyway before my kid sees it, and it turns out a non-expert can still do the useful part of that job.

I can tell when a question is about the worksheet rather than the idea ("what was example three?"). I can tell when the wording is confusing. I can tell when something wasn't on Jo's notes at all. And when a question looks right but I'm not sure, I send it to Jo with "is this fair?" and she answers in a line. The questions she's corrected, I've learnt from.

What I can't do is judge whether the right answer is right, if it's beyond me. So I don't try. I check what I can, ask about the rest, and the standard stays the tutor's.

Check: What can a parent who isn't a subject expert still check in a drafted question, and what should they do about the rest?

How to read the result without reading the score

The score is the least useful thing on the screen, and it's the thing a parent's eye goes to first. I've trained mine away from it.

What I look at instead:

• Which question was missed. One missed question is a fact. Four out of six is a mood.
• Whether two misses are the same mistake. Two wrong answers about comparing fractions is one gap, and it's a specific, fixable one. Two wrong answers on unrelated things is just a Saturday morning.
• The explanation they read. Under each answer is a line saying why. If my kid read it, the missed question has already done half its job.
• Whether they had another go. Every attempt is kept, side by side. A second attempt on Sunday that fixes the Saturday miss tells me more than either score alone.

I've stopped saying numbers out loud at all. Nobody at our table knows what anyone "got". We know what was tricky.

Check: What four things does the parent look at in a result instead of the score?

What dinner sounds like now

The change at the table came from having a cue. Instead of "what did you learn?", I can say "that one about the fractions with different bottoms, what was the trick?". That's a question with a handle on it. It can be answered in a sentence, it's about something the kid just did, and it's a question you'd ask a friend, not an interrogation.

Some lines that work in our house:

• "Which one of those was annoying?"
• "Was there one where you knew it but the question was weird?"
• "What would you have asked instead?"

That last one is my favourite. A kid who can say what question they'd have asked has understood the idea better than the question did.

And some nights I say nothing about it at all, because nothing about it was interesting that week, and dinner is dinner.

Check: Why does a question with a cue work at dinner when "what did you learn?" doesn't?

What I send the tutor

One line, on Saturday, after I've looked: "Missed the two on comparing fractions. Everything else fine."

That's all Jo needs. She told me the first time I sent one that it was the most useful message she'd ever had from a parent, because it was specific and it arrived before the next session, not after. She starts Wednesday from it. Five minutes on the thing that was missed, then on.

What I don't send: the score, my theory about why, or anything about effort. The line is a fact for a professional to use, and she uses it.

Check: What does the parent send the tutor, and why does the tutor find it useful?

If the tutor would rather run it

Some tutors would rather hold the check themselves, from their own notes, on their own page for your child. Good. Mine does both now: she runs a check at the end of the session and I run the Saturday one, and we both see both.

If your tutor runs it, ask for two things: that your child's result reaches you each week, and that you can see the attempts, not just a number. A good tutor will be glad you asked, because a parent who looks at the attempts is a parent who stops asking "how's it going?".

Either way, the child is one learner on one page, with a history that both the tutor and the parent can read. Who presses the button matters less than the fact that somebody reads the questions first and somebody reads the result after.

Check: If the tutor runs the check instead of the parent, what two things should the parent ask for?

The rules I keep for myself

These matter more than the routine.

1. Once a week. Not after every session, not daily. A check that comes too often becomes a chore, and a chore is a test with extra steps.
2. They see the result first. It's theirs. I look after, not over their shoulder.
3. The retake is theirs. I never ask whether they've had another go. If they want to, they do. About half the time they do.
4. No comparisons. Not with last week, not with a sibling, not with me at that age.
5. If it ever feels like a test, stop for a fortnight. It's happened once. We stopped. We started again when nobody was thinking about it.

The whole point was to take the test out of dinner. If the check becomes the test, I've moved the problem to Saturday, not solved it.

Check: What are the five rules the parent keeps, and what is the one condition under which the routine is paused?

If you're in Australia

Private tutoring here is common and not cheap, and it mostly runs to the school's four terms. A term is ten weeks, which is about ten Saturday checks: enough to see a pattern, and a natural moment at the end of term to look back over the record with your child and the tutor together, rather than waiting for a school report to tell you something the three of you could have seen in week three. Swap this section for your own country's rhythm; nothing above depends on it.

Check: Why does the end of a ten-week term make a natural moment to look back over the record?

Try it with your own notes →